Agentic payments, purchases that an AI agent triggers and pays for on a user’s behalf, are moving past the demo stage. In June 2026, Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines, a service built for continuous, high-frequency payments between machines. Together with Google’s open AP2 protocol and the agentic tokens offered by Visa and Stripe, it points to a common architecture that took shape in just over a year: protocols handle the agent’s identity and intent, and the card networks move the money.
Mastercard and Stripe push agents beyond single-use cards
Until recently, agentic commerce meant single-use virtual cards. Two moves in 2026 went further. First, Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines targets agents that transact with one another, chaining microtransactions that are “settled at machine speed” across cards, accounts and stablecoins. More than 30 companies signed on at launch, including Adyen, Ant International, BVNK, Checkout.com, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Getnet by Santander, Global Payments, OKX, Stripe and Tempo. “Machine payments can make it possible for services to be bought and sold among agents at very high volumes, very small values, very fast,” said Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s chief product officer. Second, Stripe had already widened support for its Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs) in March 2026. A single Stripe integration now reaches both Mastercard Agent Pay and Visa Intelligent Commerce.
Google, meanwhile, is promoting AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol), an open standard announced in September 2025 with more than 60 partners, including Mastercard, PayPal, American Express and Coinbase. AP2 defines three cryptographically signed mandates, expressed as W3C Verifiable Credentials. That pairing, an open protocol for intent and a network token for the money, is becoming the dominant pattern in production.
Every approach tokenizes, caps, and proves
| Company | Product | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Mastercard | Agent Pay / Agent Pay for Machines | Agentic token plus machine-to-machine payments, including microtransactions and stablecoins |
| Visa | Intelligent Commerce | Tokenized “AI-ready” card credentials, with spending-limit, merchant-category and real-time validation controls |
| Stripe | Agentic Commerce Suite (SPT + Agent Toolkit) | Shared tokens and programmatically issued virtual cards, embedded in the agent’s code |
| AP2 | Open protocol: signed Intent, Cart and Payment mandates (Verifiable Credentials) |
The approaches share the same logic: tokenize the sensitive data, cap what the agent can spend, and prove the authorization. AP2 splits every purchase into three mandates: the Intent Mandate (what the user wants), the Cart Mandate (the cart the agent assembles) and the Payment Mandate (what the merchant or the network will charge).
- Intent Mandate: the user sets a goal and limits (“book a Paris–Lisbon flight under €250”).
- Cart Mandate: the agent builds an actual cart and gets it approved, either explicitly or within the terms of the intent.
- Payment Mandate: the final amount goes to the network, which triggers settlement through a dedicated token.
Liability, compliance, and settlement remain open questions
Three issues draw the most attention. Security: agentic tokens keep the card number hidden, but they widen the attack surface to the agent itself and its secrets. Compliance: SCA, AML controls and traceability have to adapt to automated flows and huge volumes of tiny payments. Settlement: Mastercard says Agent Pay for Machines settles across multiple rails, stablecoins included, which builds one more bridge between traditional card payments and on-chain assets.
For France and the rest of Europe, the risk is ending up with a de facto standard built elsewhere. There is some good news. Adyen, Checkout.com and Getnet by Santander are already among the partners, and AP2’s open design leaves room for local schemes such as Cartes Bancaires (CB), France’s domestic card scheme, or account-to-account (A2A) solutions such as Wero to connect. Agentic payments are no longer a hypothesis. They are an infrastructure layer that is being wired in now.